Another Light (Lucian x Lux)
by imtoojuicy
Summary: The story of a man of the light crossing paths with the lady of luminosity. A man who seeks to love again. A woman who simply seeks love.


Warning in advance: you'll need to read Lucian's lore beforehand to understand this story's references to his wife. Long story short? His wife was also a purifier, and Thresh killed her cuz Thresh is kind of a dick head.

**1. LUCIAN**

_**Somewhere along the westernmost coastline of Demacia...**_

He skidded around the corner on all gangly fours, clawed feet and hands scrabbling frantically at ancient stone floor, his breaths coming forth as high pitched squeals of winded terror. With each hoarse exhale, animated clumps of parasitic maggots flew out from his spongy pocked lips to land on a thin carpet of moss and writhe a sickly white on dank green. Thanks to the groundwater constantly dribbling down the walls of these subterranean catacombs, the moss was fresh, plentiful, and treacherously slippery. Sure enough, the ghoul lost his footing during his overly ambitious turn, and he careened face first into an unforgiving wall of limestone. The impact sounded more juicy than painful as hidden grubs split open like rotten fruit beneath patches of necrotic skin, and a gooey translucent paste began to ooze out of his feeler-fringed mouth.

Cursing maniacally as he pulled his face free from the wall and the gluey goop of mashed maggots, he started pumping his feet again. The woebegone screams of his brothers no longer chased after him from the upper levels, which could mean only one thing: the purifier was done with them. And now, the purifier was coming for him. No time for pain. Had to keep running. Had to get away.

Two minutes and a dead end of a cul-de-sac later, running was no longer an option. Hiding it would have to be. Uttering one final wormy oath before clamming up for good, he skulked over to the corner farthest from the entrance and he pressed his bony back against a sturdy colossus of a groundwater-grooved pillar. Normally, he would have clambered up to the ceiling to spring an ambush on whoever entered the chamber; this basic tactic was very effective against those not accustomed to facing airborne enemies. However, the ghoul was positive that this would not work on the purifier. For when he and his brothers returned from a raid on a local village just twenty minutes ago, it was the _purifier_ who had been hanging upside down from the ceiling like a bat out of heaven, lying in wait for _them_.

Struggling to regulate his breathing in order to better hear any approaching footsteps, he peered around the pillar just enough so that one of his hemispherical compound eyes could haphazardly scan the darkness before him. His eye's five hundred lenses reflected nothing amiss. His ears heard distant water droplets and maggots quietly crawling along his upper lip. ****ing maggots. The back of his hand lifted up and irritatedly wiped away at them as if he were suffering from a heavily running nose.

He was positive he should have seen or heard something by now; purifiers were exceedingly effective trackers when it came to pursuing his kind, thanks to their trinkets and baubles capable of detecting otherworldly evil. Taking this into consideration, he should have put two and two together and realized that hiding behind this pillar was pointless, but he was frightened out of his corrupted mind and he was not a particularly smart or courageous ghoul to begin with. He was smart enough, however, to be dimly aware of the irony of all this; he, a creature born of the darkness and a recent emigrant from the mysterious Shadow Isles, was cowering amongst the very shadows which his kind thrived in -

A single flash of light lanced out from the other end of the room, punctuated by the sizzling hum of radiating energy. The gunshot's laser hum sounded juvenile in comparison to the satisfying roar of a powder-laden blunderbuss or the sharp and snappy crack of a long-barreled sniper rifle. And yet, the results were inarguable as the exposed upper left quadrant of the ghoul's cranium, from compound eye to leprous scalp, went up in a puff of grisly smoke. A spray of blackened ichor and bone fragments dashed against the wall behind him in a sweeping arc of artsy gore, the first bold stroke on a limestone canvas by a purifier turned action painter.

One compound eye now gone, half of the ghoul's world went permanently black (which made little difference in the grand scheme of things due to this burial chamber's impenetrable shadows). For an eternity of nanoseconds, the ghoul continued to stare dumbly out into the darkness as electrical signals bearing news of excruciating pain raced towards the center of his remarkably intact brain. Then the worst ever agony of his soon-forfeit life kicked in, and he let loose a shrill ear-shattering scream laced with the bubbly rasp of hardened phlegm.

Although the ghoul's brain was as physically intact as an exposed brain could be, his mind was gone. All thought processes went out the window as instinct took the reins of his body. And his first and only instinct was to run. Clapping a hand over his head in an effort to contain his pulsating brain and its murky soup, he darted out from the other side of the pillar -

The tomb went ablaze with a sideways shower of holy gun glory, revealing petrified skeletal shambles and pentagram murals scrawled with the blood of recent victims. The screaming ghoul flew off his feet and cratered against a wall, pinned helplessly by the lances which now tore into him a dozen at a time. His body skittered to the left and right against the limestone with the herky jerkiness of a marionette possessed, further painting the limestone canvas with great swaths of blood and guts. The raucous symphony of exploding stone married with dying ghoul drowned out the spacey humming of the blinking lances of light.

The gunfire abruptly stopped and the ghoul's torso dropped to the ground with an unceremonious wet thump, each of his limbs either completely disintegrated or lying uselessly nearby. Miraculously enough, the ghoul was still very much alive despite his reduced state and, as he stared up at the pitch black above him, all he could think about was how much he hurt all over. Unfortunately for the ghoul, it did not occur to him that he was still alive due to design, not miracle.

The only warning was one single footstep, very close by the time the ghoul could hear the purifier's approach. Then the ghoul was introduced to a whole new spectrum of pain as the low heel of a heavy boot smashed into the sternum of his chest, splitting it down the middle and caving the two halves inwards against his lungs and heart. The ghoul's lone eye would have surely bulged if compound eyes could bulge. His taut neck was a bundle of iron cords as his yawning maw of a mouth screamed and screamed and screamed throughout the catacombs.

From the darkness emerged the purifier's visored helmet, a disembodied head of gold shining down onto the hysterical ghoul. The helm was a simple and unassuming dome with its top molded into a single minimal crest; its blast shield front was etched with a sliver of a holy cross to serve as eyeholes. The man's voice was low, simmering, and pitiless. His question was singularly simple.

"Where is Thresh?"

The ghoul failed to sit up on his arse as he gibbered nonsensical threats. "We are inevitable, ye fool of the light! We are inevitable and everything shall fall under our shadows, ye filthy purifier! Lord Hecarim shall tear you limb from limb as you have done to me, and he will drink your blood and drag you on the ground behind him until you aieeeeeeeee!"

The crunching of the ghoul's chest intensified as the purifier's foot sank halfway into him. The purifier ignored the munching sounds of maggot mandibles as they feasted on their dying host, the monster's flesh too weak to regenerate back. He asked once more.

_"Where. Is. Thresh."_

"I don't know I don't know! My master is Lord Hecarim, stop stop stop, please stop, it hurts so much you filthy purifier I cooked your parents in a cauldron of lovely stew and I mounted your sister like the ****ty ***** she was and she begged for more - _**aieeee stop stop stop, please stop, pleeeease AIEEEEEEE**_"

The foot was now twisting its weathered sole against the beating flesh of what passed for a ghoul's heart, scraping and scoring. Even though the purifier was an only child, the sister comments still did not rest well with him.

"Very well then. Where is Hecarim?" Might as well glean whatever information he could from this pathetic mewling mess.

The ghoul bawled and moved like a malnourished child too weak to lift its head. He had no tear ducts, but ichor seeped out from the facets of his compound eye nonetheless due to all the excess fluids being forced outwards from his collapsing chest. His ragged stubs for limbs flopped less and less.

The maw's fringe of feelers rippled with black foam and white larvae as he whispered in vain. "Lord Hecarim... save me... I serve only you... Lord... Hecarim... save... me..."

A toneless reminder from behind the golden mask: "There is no salvation for the likes of you."

A double tap of blinding light, and the ghoul's head redistributed itself all over the ground. The stubby limbs stilled. The torso shrunk into itself as the maggots grew fat and swollen.

This interrogation was over.

_**Several hours later**_

Lucian finally stopped walking eastbound, picking a small clearing on a flat grassy plain where no man or beast could approach without being seen. This should be far enough inland to settle for the day, he decided. The Shadow Isles had become vastly more aggressive along the western coast of Demacia, but their activity was still mostly confined to small fishing villages. For all their preaching of how inevitable they were, the shadowy pussy foots had yet to tackle anything large enough to possess a standing militia. Doing so would surely draw the attention and ire of the faraway capital city, and Lucian was under the impression that the Shadow Isles wanted no part of Demacia's military might just yet.

He hunkered down to feed larger branches to his little pyramid of briskly burning twigs and tinder. The ravenous newborn fire gagged for a moment, then the hungry flames returned twice as high as they greedily licked up and down the bone dry wood. With an affirming grunt of a job well done, he rocked back onto his rear end with a plop, held out his hands, and enjoyed the invigorating warmth. When one spent as much time out in the wilderness as he did, one learned to treasure the simple pleasure of a campfire, for flammable wood was not always readily available depending on one's location. His provisions did include a cache of artificial heat packs, but he was loathe to use those things; the packs' pungent Piltover chemicals reminded him too much of the Shadow Isles' distinctly formaldehyde stink. He vastly preferred the natural and savory scent of grilled timber.

Not all woodfires were equal, however. For example, the little fishing village which that coven of ghouls had raided earlier tonight? He had been forced to set the entire place ablaze just three hours ago, and he had taken no pleasure in doing so as he watched the reanimated corpses stagger about, sink to the ground, and succumb. What had once been their homes were now their funeral pyres, and the only man to see them off to the afterlife was a total and complete stranger from a different part of the world.

Anger is also another simple sort of pleasure and, for the moment, he allowed himself to indulge, his eyes seething with the burning white fury of the stars above. Too many lives lost these days. Far too many. Yet the numbers were not high enough, and the town names not important enough, for the Demacian government to pay heed just yet. Granted, the king and his mighty military had good reason to forever look to the east where Noxus loomed, but therein lay the distinction between a man of the military and a man of the light, yes? A man of the military fought evil when evil posed a threat to his country. A man of the light fought evil because it was the right thing to do.

The anger felt good, far more than a mere guilty pleasure. And this frightened him a little, for wrath is the most corrupting of sins. It was not difficult for him to put the anger aside, however, for he was very tired and sleep was tugging at his eyelids, coaxing him to lie down next to her.

So he turned in for the night (or early morning, if you will), pulling a pair of blankets over him as his eyelids finally closed. The campfire would eventually die, but no matter; the silver cross around his neck would keep watch, warning the skin of his chest with a molten heat whenever evil dew near.

One might wonder why a man would eschew all forms of creature comfort for weeks on end, sleeping on beds of dirt with rocks for pillows. Why a man would cast aside his diurnal ways and set his alarm clock to the moon, so that he could better track down a nocturnal prey. Why a man would travel back and forth between all four corners of Runeterra, forever putting himself in mortal danger as he pursued the most hideous abominations a human mind could conceive.

This was all for her. For her, he would take the undead life of the one known as Thresh. He would eradicate all evil, wipe it clean from the face of this earth. He would make it so that the light of the living shone uninhibited. This was what she would have wanted.

This was what he kept telling himself anyway, as he fell into slumber at the first glow of sunrise. He slept alone on a godforsaken field in the middle of nowhere, with only the company of a sputtering and dying fire to keep him warm.

**END OF CHAPTER**

I'm doing this doodle for a variety of reasons. One big reason is because I love bullet ballads, I love that ****. Lucian's design seems inspired by the Equilibrium movie, but Equilibrium itself drew inspiration from Hong Kong bullet ballads, and I watched a lot of the Chow Yun Fat movies like Hard Boiled and The Killer. The plots are incredibly campy and cheesy, but they're still lovable in their own way and there is something irresistible about the utter impracticality of gun kata. So irresistible that Lucian's probably the first champion I'm going to buy with 7800 IP on release.

Secondly, when I wrote a doodle for Lucian's judgment (you can find it in my FF profile), I had Lucian take special interest in the Council's records of Lux's judgment. Originally, I had intended it to be nothing more than a cute play on words. A guy who shoots light, a girl who shoots light, haha, OF COURSE HE'D NOTICE HER, RIGHT?! HAH SO CLEVER! But just the mere possibility did get me thinking a bit...

Then the final reason why I started this doodle is cuz I heard a song on the radio the other day which I hadn't listened to in a while: Billy Joel's "The Longest Time". It's a doo wop song from the 80's that I've always dug, and when I listened to it, I was like, you know what, I think I can definitely make this work... so we will see...

Oh yeah, and to the people wondering about Ezreal and Lux... who's Ezreal? Kekekeke.

Oh yeah, and I added the helmet for Lucian in this chapter because only an idiot goes into a nest of monsters without a helmet, imo.


End file.
